Greg Egan(click on names to see more mathematical fiction
by the same author)

...

Contributed by
Vijay Fafat

The story talks about a xenomathematician's quest to understand hieroglyphic tablets on an alien planet containing the mathematical knowledge of an extinct civilization. The extinct aliens had apparently proved a theorem uniting their seven distinct strands of mathematics (represented on "seven dimensional commmuting hypercube"), on their way to something called "The Big Crunch" in mathematics (similar to the Langlands program).

(quoted from Glory )

“I'm a xenomathematician,” Joan said. “I've come here in the hope of
collaborating with your archaeologists in their study of Niah artifacts.”

Pirit was stunned. “What do you know about the Niah?”

“Not as much as I'd like to.” Joan gestured at her Noudah body. “As I'm sure
you've already surmised, we've listened to your broadcasts for some time, so we know
pretty much what an ordinary Noudah knows. That includes the basic facts about the
Niah. Historically they've been referred to as your ancestors, though the latest studies
suggest that you and they really just have an earlier common ancestor. They died out
about a million years ago, but there's evidence that they might have had a sophisticated
culture for as long as three million years. There's no indication that they ever developed
space ﬂight. Basically, once they achieved material comfort, they seem to have devoted
themselves to various artforms, including mathematics.”

“So you've traveled twenty light years just to look at Niah tablets?” Pirit was
incredulous.

“Any culture that spent three million years doing mathematics must have
something to teach us.”

“Really?” Pirit's face became blue with disgust. “In the ten thousand years since
we discovered the wheel, we've already reached halfway to the Cataract. They wasted
their time on useless abstractions.”

Joan said, “I come from a culture of spacefarers myself, so I respect your
achievements. But I don't think anyoneﬁnd out, with the help of your people.”

(quoted from Glory )

It was as beautiful and satisfying as Joan could have wished, merging six earlier,
simpler theorems while extending the techniques used in their proofs. She could even
see hints at how the same methods might be stretched further to yield still stronger
results. “The Big Crunch” had always been a slightly mocking, irreverent term, but now
she was struck anew by how little justice it did to the real trend that had fascinated the
Niah. It was not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one
branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a different guise.
Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful mathematical system was rich
enough to mirror in part — and sometimes in a complex and distorted fashion — every
other sufficiently beautiful system. Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing
proved to have been a waste of time, but everything was shown to be magnificently
intertwined.

First published in The New Space Opera, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner
Dozois (2007) and soon to be republished in Egan's collection Dark Integers and Other Stories.
At the moment, a PDF file of this story is available for free at typepad.com.